Digital Marketing – 5 Marketing Automation Tools

EDRIS DZULKIFLI
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February 21, 2019

If this is your first attempt at running a digital marketing campaign, you may be overwhelmed with the amount of content creation, tracking, testing and reiterating. Fret not, as there is help available to automate your entire digital marketing process.

Perform a quick search online for “digital marketing automation” and you will find an entire arsenal of digital marketing tools at your disposal. Before you go ahead and begin purchasing and subscribing to all of these tools, it is important to understand how each tool can be used to your advantage, and how they play a part of your overall marketing strategy.

Data Analytics

Big data, data analysis, data science – data catchphrases have been bandied about by marketers as the holy grail of digital marketing. But what exactly does data mean and how can you harness it?

Data is numerical information that is gleaned from all online activity. As a marketer, data can help you understand how customers are finding out about your company (search engines, ads, social media, referrals, reviews, etc.). Data can also include your customers’ habits, preferences and inclinations – useful information that can assist in tailoring your product offers, user interface and content to suit the customers’ needs and wants. Most importantly, data can also help you keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Instead of spreading yourself across all possible marketing channels, using data to understand the effectiveness of each channel will allow you to optimise your efforts. Here are 3 popular tools in the market:

While data provides you with quantitative statistics, social listening (also known as social monitoring) helps you take a qualitative approach to gathering information. Social listening tools allow you to keep track of conversations about your brand, related topics and even your competitors. Information is generally grouped by topics and by user sentiment, which can help paint a detailed picture of how your customer feels about your brand.

This will help in creating brand messages that can directly address your customers’ pain points and even help you refine your product offerings to stay ahead of your competition. On a more personal level, you could even jump in on conversations about your brand to directly address your potential customers. Take a look at these 3 social listening platforms that you might consider adding to your arsenal of marketing automation tools:

IFTTT – allows you to trigger alerts when there is a mention of your brand on RSS feeds, apps and even devices.

Hootsuite – aggregates all mentions of your brand on multiple social media platforms in one feed.

Retargeting

Ever browsed through an online store looking for red shoes? Did those red shoes follow you around on the Internet over the next month? That’s the essence of retargeting. The retargeting process begins when a potential customer visits your website and leaves without making a purchase.

With retargeting, you can deliver tailored content to that specific customer based on what they’ve viewed on your website. These can come in the form of image ads on the last product a customer viewed, personalised discount codes sent to a customer’s mobile phones or a reminder to complete their checkout. Retargeting is a useful tool in creating multiple touchpoints with a customer which you can then tailor and adjust to create conversion paths. Here are a few worth checking out:

Keeping track of all the information and communication touchpoints can be daunting, a task that no one person can handle alone. This is where marketing automation comes in handy. Create end-to-end customer journeys by linking up your e-mail newsletters, social media, website, media monitors, content portals, data analytics and e-commerce all in one dashboard so you can have a big picture overview of your marketing performance. This will allow you to make adjustments to optimise your plan, and automate content delivery and execution. Here are 3 of the more popular marketing automation tools in the market:

Marketo – a comprehensive suite of integrations that helps both marketing and sales.

Otherwise known as real-time buying (RTB), programmatic advertising or programmatic buying, programmatic campaigns empower marketers through data-informed ad delivery. From customising your ad visual and copy to suit specific audience profiles, to the placement of your ads on platforms that generate the best results, programmatic campaigns have forever changed the landscape of advertising. Instead of throwing out a one-size-fits-all campaign, you can now test multiple ads in different creative formats and deliver them to specific audience types, updating and refining them as the campaign progresses. 3 RTB tools to consider are: